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How much compassion is due someone who quite publicly hated the very idea of compassion?
This question kept haunting me as I read Alexandra Popoff's new biography of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known to the world as Ayn Rand.
The life traced out in Popoff's retelling (also discernible between the lines of Rand's own novels and public pronouncements) conforms in broad outlines to what literary critic Parul Sehgal dubbed "the trauma plot," when violence a long way back is revealed at the end to account for a person's least likable, least explicable traits and actions.
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Rand, author of the single-minded and literal heavyweight classics "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," was not shy about the proximate cause of her trauma, although she would never have used that word herself. She blamed "Communism," but that name covered a multitude of sins and doesn't alone explain why Rand felt additionally compelled to advocate against most acts of human kindness.
Popoff, a prolific biographer of Russian literary figures from Vasily Grossman to Sophia Tolstoy and the wider Tolstoy circle, is most comfortable and expansive detailing the hothouse competitive atmosphere of Alisa's early years at the elite and progressive Stoyunina gymnasium for girls. Her classmates there included Vladimir Nabokov's sister Olga, along with other teachers and students who would go on to shape the early Soviet arts scene before fleeing to exile (the lucky ones), getting sent to the gulag or being shot during various purges of the Russian intelligentsia.
The future Ayn Rand's survival and eventual rise to prosperity and fame was as much the result of a diversity of options and lucky breaks as any superhuman qualities like the ones espoused in her work. The extended Rosenbaum family, especially the Kaplans on Rand's mother's side, covered a fair spectrum of 20th-century Eastern European Jewish experiences and outcomes: One uncle joined the Bolsheviks and, in 1919, became director of the Museum of the Revolution in St. Petersburg, ensuring the family could eventually rebound from the confiscation of their apartment and family business (a pharmacy); a great aunt had emigrated to the United States in the 1890s - one of her daughters owned a movie theater in Chicago and introduced Rand to her Hollywood connections, while the family sponsored Rand's initial travel visa in 1926; another cousin studied medicine at the famous Robert Koch Institute in Germany.
Meanwhile, the Bolshevik abolition of sex discrimination in universities enabled Rand to enroll at the Institute of the Living Word, the center of both the avant-garde literary experimentation of the Russian formalists and the art of Soviet propagandistic oratory. (Rand preferred the latter.) She later studied film production and screenwriting at the Leningrad State Institute for Screen Arts, giving her access to her beloved American films and burnishing her résumé for when she would land in Hollywood as "a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia," as she later remembered herself in a letter to Cecil B. DeMille.
Rand was also fortunate to have been rejected by her teen crush, Lev Bekkerman, a talented engineering student who, thanks to Rand's early Russian diaries and letters, Popoff identifies as the model for John Galt in "Atlas Shrugged."
Bekkerman would go on to design early Soviet tank engines for Stalin before he was murdered by the Soviet state in 1937. Rand's eventual Americanization did not come about through recognition of her extraordinary abilities in her field or perceived importance to American society, but through her marriage to a C-list actor named Frank O'Connor. ("A shotgun wedding - with Uncle Sam holding the shotgun," as she described it.)
Rand supported O'Connor through a series of odd Hollywood jobs while she also wrote the scripts and early novels that would launch her career.
The Rand who carved success for herself out of these hardscrabble Hollywood years appears, in Popoff's account, as a direct ancestor of our own era's massively online authors: a relentless polemicist and talented propagandist who knew how to stay on message, intolerant of nuance in her characters and in her life, nakedly ambitious, often confusing friendship with uncritical adulation and unqualified support, hyperaggressive but also easily wounded by the slightest criticism.
When Bennett Cerf, the legendary Random House editor, requested cuts to "Atlas Shrugged," Rand asked him whether he would dare edit the Bible. Once the novel appeared, she organized her followers to write letters protesting negative reviews and later paid for a full-page rebuttal to a critique of her essays in the New York Times.
What she lacked in talent, grace and subtlety of intelligence, she more than made up for in unyielding drive, an amphetamine-boosted capacity for late-night writing sessions after a full day's work, and a terrifyingly consistent imagination.
Popoff also partly credits Rand's American success to her early training as a Soviet system writer; she may have hated what the Bolsheviks stood for and what they did to her family and friends, but she was too good a student not to absorb their rhetorical lessons. Rand intuited the basic principles of "politically correct" socialist realism (once cheekily summarized as "boy meets tractor") even before they were officially promulgated by Stalin's commissars.
The heroic capitalists, architects and engineers of her fiction were American counterparts to the heroic proletarians of novels like "How the Steel Was Tempered," by Nikolai Ostrovsky. Her insistence on outputs as the sole measure of economic happiness reflected both her own tremendous productivity and her early exposure to classic Soviet quota economics. She liked to pepper her intellectual disputes with invective: One economist was a "frantic coward."
Her arguments for granting a vast leniency to exceptional individuals, whose own self-interest she believed was identical with the greater interest of humanity, perfectly mirrored Lenin's and Stalin's justifications for revolutionary violence in the name of history.
Popoff is less clear, however, when it comes to what makes Rand's life unusually noteworthy in a Jewish context - all the more unfortunate because this book is published as part of Yale University's "Jewish Lives" series. Popoff might have been better off avoiding the weak attempts to detail biblical influences in Rand's fiction - they are few and mostly unconvincing - and instead done more to contextualize Rand within the long political history of Jewish Messianism and the messiah-like figures to have emerged from the Russian-Jewish encounter.
After the success of "The Fountainhead" and while she was writing "Atlas Shrugged," Rand became a mid-20th-century cult figure to rival Trotsky and the grand rabbi of Lubavitch Hasidism, Menachem Schneerson. In modern Jewish experience, she is the only woman to do so. Unlike libertarianism, which predated Rand and already had an American following, Objectivism, as Rand named her philosophy, attracted a core group of mostly first-generation American and Canadian Jews who were in their teens and early 20s during the Eisenhower years. Unmoored from traditional religious beliefs, often gifted overachievers in music, math or science (like longtime Rand loyalist and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan), they sought an authoritative doctrine that would allow them to pursue personal happiness and financial success without the hang-ups of their parents' more anxious generation.
Predictably, the Objectivist Institute devolved into a cult of personality, complete with dogmatic reading groups, sex scandals, official purges and denunciations, and plenty of hurt feelings. Rand had come home, and that home was the groupthink atmosphere that her alter ego, Alisa Rosenbaum, had fled. Her outright rejection of psychoanalysis, that other great Jewish messianic cult of the 20th century, was as overdetermined as it was unavoidable.
Nonetheless, it is Freudian insight more than Objectivist theories that keep her and her writing relevant to the contemporary American political and cultural scene. Although contemptuous of human vulnerability and suffering, Rand's political philosophy remains, at its core, a classic drama of self-destructive victimhood, a revolt of snubbed, self-proclaimed elites. Her various supermen of all genders - Howard Roark, Dominique Francon, John Galt, Dagny Taggart - are primarily motivated by the desire to avenge perceived slights; their major actions come across as spiteful and reactive, like the patently absurd idea of the capital strike in "Atlas Shrugged" and Roark dynamiting his own buildings in "The Fountainhead."
Rand's works also overflow with lengthy courtroom dramas where the defendant repeatedly acknowledges bad deeds (including murder) only to argue they are not guilty by reason of inherent superiority. Rand always invites judgment, and always refuses it.
Someone curious about deeper patterns in human lives is left wondering what might have gone differently if Alisa hadn't suffered an apparent crisis of confidence after she lost her first scriptwriting job for DeMille. (Popoff refers to it as "depression.") She then ghosted her parents and two sisters, not replying to their letters at just the moment they were trying to join her in America.
That they never blamed her when she eventually wrote to them again, after it was too late for the visa, seemed to have made it worse for Rand. She had assumed a responsibility she was unable to bear, or had refused a responsibility that was hers alone: What to do when your loved ones are hostage to a force you believe to be an absolute evil and you have the means to attempt their rescue and don't?
She would spend the rest of her life and many hundreds of thousands of words justifying that failure without ever addressing it directly. All of her family but her sister Nora, the youngest of the Rosenbaums, would eventually die during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. In 1974, after 47 years of separation, the sisters met in New York, quarreled about altruism and Solzhenitsyn - Rand disliked his public professions of Christianity. Rand never spoke to her sister again.
Inside the roaring fire of individualism, the still small voice of guilt.
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